


Are You Listening?

by jacquelee



Series: Writer's Month 2020 [14]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen, based on an Outer Limits episode, drug mention, mention of deaths (of non-named characters), warnings for hospitalization and brief mention of (assumed) infection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25903222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacquelee/pseuds/jacquelee
Summary: There is a signal from outer space that seems to be different depending on who is listening to it. Zari and her colleagues first don't think anything about it but then they realize that something major is going on.
Series: Writer's Month 2020 [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1861585
Kudos: 2
Collections: Writer's Month 2020





	Are You Listening?

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Writer's Month 2020](https://writersmonth.tumblr.com) for the Day 14 prompt Metamorphosis.
> 
> Based on the Outer Limits episode 3x14 Music of the Spheres. Any scientific or astronomic inaccuracies are on the writers of that episode, not me, lol, I just took what they wrote and changed it into modern settings and made it a Legends AU.

Listening to sounds from outer space and recognizing some sort of pattern was not something Zari was particularly excited about anymore, she'd been interning at the observatory for too long to know that there was a near zero percent likelihood that it was actually aliens trying to communicate. But there was something different about this sound, something unique and weird. 

It had come from Certus, a blue dwarf star system far away from Earth. And sure, it was probably nothing, just atmospheric bounce or background radiation but Zari thought there was some kind of pattern to it. 

She showed it to Sara, who was her best friend and roommate in college, which is why they took this internship together, and to Felicity, who was working with them and was the biggest computer genius she knew, besides herself of course. 

Both agreed that the signal was something interesting, especially the longer they listened to it, but when their supervisor, Director Hunter, came in to remind them to work on the increased solar activity and sunspots they were supposed to be studying, he asked them to turn of the horrible noise and they did so, begrudgingly going back to work.

Except that Zari still felt the need to share the sound, so she send it to her little brother, Behrad and to Amaya, who was a few years older than her but one of her best friends nonetheless. She had gone back to her native Zambesi a year ago but they still regularly kept in contact. 

Sara and Felicity had the same urge and send the sound to several of their friends and in Sara's case to her sister Laurel. After that, they tried to forget about it, even when it was still somewhat on their minds, especially Felicity's. 

A few hours later, when they were all on their lunch break, which they as usual spend in their office together, they checked their messages. When Sara saw Laurel's message asking why she would send random noise, she laughed. 

Zari and Felicity looked at her questioningly.

"Apparently my sister thinks that there is absolutely nothing to that sound from Certus, she said it's just random noise." Still checking other messages, she realized her friends talked very differently. "Mona and Charlie think it's the best music ever, though, they're really excited about it. Weird."

She shrugged it off but Zari huffed out a laugh. 

"My brother does too. Apparently he showed it to all his friends and they're now all listening to it. Guess there's something they hear that we can't, funny."

There were still a lot of messages she hadn't actually checked yet, even some from her parents, which was weird but not unusual. She started going through them, while Felicity had taken to browse her social media and realized in seconds that something very weird was going on. 

"Whoa!"

"What?"

She turned the sound on her phone on and both the others heard that it was clearly playing the sound they had been thinking of for hours now.

"That signal or whatever it is? It went viral. And by that I mean globally. Everyone is talking about it, everywhere."

"What the hell?"

In that moment, someone entered the room. 

"Turn off that noise!"

Sara was the first to recover from the shock of seeing Ava Sharpe, one of the observatory's security guards. 

"Oh, come on Sharpie, don't you think it's beautiful?"

She obviously said it only to get a rise out of Ava, but when she saw that the guard was accompanied by Director Hunter and several black clad SWAT team looking armed agents, she quickly shut her mouth. Felicity shut off the signal, but Zari wasn't as easily intimidated.

"What's going on?"

"That sound? Nobody knows what it is or where it's coming from, but IP address investigations showed that the very first emergence of it can be traced back to this lab. What the hell is it?"

Director Hunter was clearly agitated, but Zari, Sara and Felicity just looked at each other in confusion. Zari took the lead, less confident now, but seeing that she was the one who had heard the signal first she thought it was the right thing for her to speak up.

"The, um, the signal, it came from Certus. It's a blue dwarf, in a quadrant of space I was observing in the morning. I assumed it was just some kind of background radiation or something. I think there's some pattern to it, some interesting harmony, that's all."

"And you sent it to your brother and your friends?" He looked at all of them one by one. "All three of you did?"

"Yes. Just because I, well, we, thought it was kind of weird and funny. What is going on?"

"That signal, it's some sort of drug. An incredibly strong one. Nobody really knows yet and so far it only affects children and teenagers, but the ones it does affect, it does so instantaneously and radically. First everyone thought it was a hoax but now it is treated like some form of attack, even though nobody knows from whom. Multiple countries have already declared a state of emergency. The physical alterations the signal causes are as of yet unclear but trying to keep it away from the affected causes immense symptoms of withdrawal."

All three of them were shocked to say it mildly. How in the world had this happened in just a few hours? Zari was the first to recover, at least marginally. She cleared her throat. 

"I have no idea what it could be. You're saying it's a drug?"

"That is what it looks like right now. If it indeed came from outer space, we must go under the assumption that this is an alien attack." That was said by one of the guards who had come in with Director Hunter and Ava. She now put her hand out towards Zari, who shook it. "Agent Danvers. We are investigating this signal and now that it is clear where it originated, we will adjust our strategy accordingly. We expect your full cooperation going forward."

Without waiting for an answer, she strode out of the room, leaving some of her people behind, who immediately started plugging the equipment out and carrying it off.

"Hey!"

Felicity was not amused, and neither were Sara and Zari, but a firm shake of Director Hunter's head stopped them.

"They're going to confiscate everything. I promised them our full cooperation. Whether this is truly some kind of attack or something else, it could either blow over soon or lead to the end of the human race."

It would have sounded overdramatic if the situation wasn't so serious. Zari swallowed and thought about what this meant for her friends, for her family, for her little brother. Suddenly, she remembered that she still hadn't read all the messages, especially the ones from her parents and she took her phone out again, just to jump up from her seat when she read the messages that got increasingly more desperate, with the last one saying they were in the hospital with Behrad. 

"I need to go!"

"Wait, we don't know if they want to conduct any interviews, you should stay here to-"

"My little brother is in the hospital. He's fourteen years old. I'm going."

She glared at Director Hunter, daring him to stop her. Sara came to her help. 

"Felicity and I will stay here. Whatever they want to ask, we can answer, and if we need something from Zari, we can just call her, right?"

Zari nodded gratefully. 

"Of course." She was already nearly at the elevators when she realized that Ava had followed her. She side eyed her. "You know I don't really need a babysitter, right?"

Staying as stoic as ever, Ava just nodded once curtly.

"I am aware of that. But we don't know how long it will stay under wraps that this signal, whatever it is, originated here. There will be paparazzi and the like. I would feel better if you had someone by your side."

Zari realized she hadn't thought about that. In this case, she would indeed also feel better if she wasn't alone to field any invasive questions any journalists or pseudo journalists could have. She smiled at Ava.

"Thank you."

Ava smiled back. 

"Of course."

The drive to the hospital was largely quiet, Zari being too anxious to say much of anything. Her head was racing. Whatever this was, it was nothing good. There were little signs of impending catastrophe in the streets, though there was more traffic than usual, a sign that many people were deviating from their schedules to be with their kids. 

Getting closer to the hospital, the difference to a normal day was more and more noticeable. Eventually, there was no way to get further, everything was backed up. Ava offered to drive Zari's car and see if she could somehow find a parking space, so that Zari could walk to the hospital and she gladly agreed.

When she got inside, it was pure chaos. Screaming children, desperate parents, hospital staff trying and failing to organize things. There was no way she would get any information right now, the line in front of the counter was so long, it was wrapping around the seats in the waiting room, so she got out her phone and texted her parents, asking where they were. 

She got the room number and immediately went there. Apparently the situation was worse than just the signal being a drug, since she now clearly saw kids who were affected physically, their skin in some places looking hardened and glowing in unnatural colors. 

Finally, she reached Behrad's room. Her parents immediately came to hug her, but she only had eyes for her brother, who seemed so small in the big white hospital bed. He was sleeping but she could see clearly that there were many patches of his skin that were already affected, glowing, nearly as if they were metallic. 

After telling her that the doctors had no idea what was wrong with the kids and that they currently assumed it was some sort of infection induced by sound waves that only people under twenty years of age were susceptible to, her parents asked her a million questions, but she had no idea how to answer them. She didn't know anything either. And she had a lot of questions of her own, like what the doctors thought about the skin condition but other than there being an unusually high amount of metal in the children's blood stream, they couldn't say much about it. 

After a few hours, Behrad woke up and cried for the music, saying without it he was in pain. The doctors gave him pain medication but it was not enough, it didn't help. Zari had been looking up any news she could get and it seemed like there was nothing anyone could think of doing, short of actually letting the affected listen to the signal. When she read that there had already been deaths of those who were denied that, she made the decision to opt for the smaller evil and play the signal, even when her parents disagreed. 

But it instantly seemed to calm Behrad down and even when his skin was now glowing even more, this was easier for Zari than seeing her brother in pain. 

From Ava, who had come in eventually, having found a parking space far far away from the hospital, she heard that the government was still treating this like an attack and now that there were reports of children who had listened to the music for a long time saying that they were 'ready' for something, whatever it could be, they were looking into the possibility that this was an attempt to turn all children and teenagers against their own race, even though none of the affected had shown signs of violence as long as they were given access to the signal.

At least so far still nobody had traced this back to them and the government still kept the origin of the signal under wraps. The media was coming up with their own theories from Illuminati to the devil turning all the children into demons. Of course, many had thought about aliens, but so far, none of the speculations were even slightly plausible. 

Amidst all the different theories, there was something that was nagging at Zari's brain, something that didn't add up. She needed to know what exactly the changes were that the signal caused. 

When she called Sara and Felicity, they quickly filled her in on everything and she learned that she wasn't the only one asking that question. Around the world, people had exposed different types of living matter to the signal, animals and plants alike and they had gotten very interesting results.

While they were on the phone, Felicity read out loud an article that had just been posted, saying that scientists in Central City's Star Labs, specifically someone called Cisco, stipulated that the changes were not harmful as long as they were allowed to happen uninterruptedly, and that the end result was an immense protection from ultra violet radiation. 

Hearing that, Zari jumped up, suddenly realizing something, and apparently, she wasn't the only one, because on the other end of the line, she heard both Sara and Felicity gasp.

"Ultra violet radiation!"

"A blue dwarf!"

"The solar activity!"

All three of them talked at the same time, and Zari couldn't contain her excitement, pacing the room. 

"Can you pull up-"

"Way ahead of you, looking at data from sixty years back right now."

There was a small pause and then Sara spoke, her excitement and awe palpable. 

"It's different! It's a yellow dwarf. Just like our sun!"

"A spectral shift." She said it quietly, her voice trembling. "The unusual solar activities, they were warning signs. We just didn't know how to read them."

"But they did. They went through this before, they had to adapt, to change and they wanted to help us. This is not an attack. They are trying to save us."

All three of them were silent for a moment, processing all of this. Then, they all jumped to action, eager to do something about this, now that they knew what it exactly was.

It wasn't that difficult to call a meeting with the highest officials working on this crisis, especially not after they assured Star Labs cooperation. Cisco was thrilled to hear their theory and backed it up immediately, saying that it made perfect sense. Eventually the evidence convinced the relevant people that this was indeed happening, that the sun's spectral shift would change everything in just a few weeks, and that it was the highest priority to play the signal as far and wide as possible, to give every living thing on Earth a chance to change. 

Satellites were sent into orbit to transmit the signal everywhere. A treatment was devised for those over twenty and those hard of hearing or deaf to still undergo the changes. It was disseminated by every government on Earth. 

A few weeks later, Behrad and Zari and their family and friends were standing out in the street to watch the sun change spectrums. 

They now all had golden metallic skin and no hair, the end result of the change they had undergone. When they watched the new sun appear in the sky, a spectacular sight, Zari thought about those who had sent them a signal to spare them pain and death. 

A signal that was heard loud and clear by those who were listening.


End file.
